The news: Freehand, a San Francisco startup whose AI agents manage supply chain spend and back-office operations for large enterprises, raised a $75 million Series B co-led by Battery Ventures and NewRoad Capital Partners, per Crunchbase. The company has now raised $100 million.
What it does: Freehand's agents read contracts, policies, emails, and internal data to verify supplier bills, track operational milestones, negotiate vendor adjustments, and process payments across 60 to 70 countries. The company says the software recovers 5% to 10% of total spend and cuts procure-to-pay cycle times by more than 70%.
The customers: About 50, including Meta, Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer, and Cardinal Health, with the agents processing billions in payments without human supervision, per the company.
The round: Nexus Venture Partners and former Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker also participated. Freehand raised a $25 million Series A in 2024; the new valuation was not disclosed, though CEO Nitin Jayakrishnan called it "a significant step up."
The backdrop: Jayakrishnan and co-founder Abhijeet Manohar previously built Pando, a transportation management and procure-to-pay platform, and stepped back to launch Freehand in 2024. Pando sold to a strategic buyer earlier this year. The raise extends a run of back-office AI rounds in the supply chain: Orderful, which automates EDI connections between shippers and 3PLs, raised a $35 million Series C led by Koch Disruptive Technologies in June.
"Our ask of the enterprise ... is to allow us to give AI a free hand to run supply chain finance," Jayakrishnan told Crunchbase.
